“We can have a good life together in Nebraska, Aurora – a goddamn great life,” Ryker said. “Just give me the chance to prove it to you.” A ring appeared in Ryker’s callused hand and slipped onto Aurora’s finger. It was the same ring that she had left beside her dress more than a month before.
It felt like a lifetime ago.
“Um,” she said, hesitating.
There was the sound of rushing wind and something thin and tail-like whipped past the window to her right. Casting an eye over her shoulder, Aurora noticed that Finn had slipped out of the room.
“Come on, baby,” Ryker said. “Make me the happiest guy in the world. For real, this time.”
Images of Finn sped through Aurora’s mind; eating dinner, pouring wine, hanging naked from his chains, standing on the balcony spying down at her.
Then she thought of what he was.
Aurora smiled down at Ryker and nodded.
Chapter 10
Familiarity. That was the word that kept circulating through Aurora’s mind, spinning around and around like one of those little toy airplanes attached to the ceiling with a piece of string.
Familiarity.
She sat in the passenger seat of Ryker’s trusty old pick-up– with the tape-deck, faded beige seats and takeout coffee in the cup holder – and stared unseeingly out the window at cars flashing past in the opposite direction. They had been traveling along the I-80 West for a few hours now, and had just crossed the state line between New York and Pennsylvania. Ryker’s all-time favorite band, Vivid Peepers, was blasting.
Familiarity. It wasn’t a bad thing. Everything about Aurora’s life in Nebraska was familiar. Predictable. The thought of what she was going back to was the mental equivalent of a warm bath, especially after the last few days. She could see the next few years unspooling like a reel of film: shopping where she had always shopped, seeing people she had known her whole life, and getting her hair and nails done at the same salons. It was comforting and safe.
And boring, right? her brain asked her pointedly.
Before she could answer herself, Aurora was jogged from her musings by Ryker squeezing her thigh.
“Aurora, I can’t wait to tell everyone that we’re back together again. And engaged! I kept the dress, you know. Jake and Travis and Sherman, you know – they told me that I should burn it. Light it up that night when we’d had a few drinks. But I just couldn’t do it. Hell, maybe it was Fate, huh?”
Aurora made a non-committal noise in her throat – a sort of verbal shrug – and smiled at Ryker’s beaming face. The guy seemed to glow with some inner light, he was so ecstatic. Aurora marvelled at that someone could be so smitten with her. A little facet of her soul was also slightly annoyed at him being so happy to take her back. Surely, the guy had a little more pride than that? She’d left him at the goddamn altar for goodness sake!
Aurora pinched herself, realizing that Ryker was talking to her and she hadn’t been taking in a word.
“Honestly, darlin’,” he was saying, “you’re going to make me the happiest guy in Nebraska! Sure, most people don’t have the false start that we had, but I think that little break’s made us stronger than ever. Don’t you reckon?”
Aurora was looking at the tanned, weathered face of her high-school love Here was a man that was solid and dependable and down-to-earth, as reliably consistent in his actions as the day was long. The kind of man whose answer you knew before you even asked the question.
And he doesn’t come with any enormous, fire-breathing, scaly baggage either.
“Aurora?” Ryker said, breaking once more into her thoughts. “Lemon-pie? Are you listening?”
“Um, jeez, sorry, I’m just so frazzled after everything that happened over the past couple of days, you know?” Aurora said. “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
“I don’t wonder,” Ryker said. “New York is one hell of a place, huh? Not like back home.”
“No. Definitely not like back home.”
“Are you looking forward to the wedding
Aurora thought about that. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. It’ll be a fun day.”
And it would. She knew it would be because she could see exactly how it would play out.
“Hey, you know what,” Ryker said, “what would you think about ditching the big wedding?”
Despite her swirling thoughts Aurora raised her eyebrows and looked at her fiancé. “What? You don’t want to get married at church? Without our family and friends?”
Ryker shrugged and rubbed his stubbly jaw. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel as important as it did, you know – where we get married, I mean, not the whole getting married part.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Well, we could just elope, you know?” He laughed. “Maybe get ourselves one of those Vegas-themed weddings. Get married by a dwarf Elvis or whatever.”
“A dwarf Elvis?” Aurora asked, dumbstruck.
“You know what I mean, just do something fun and quick. Wham, bam thank you, ma’am. Then we’re married and we can start our lives together. You can move in and start feathering the nest. Then we can start working on our own brood of mini Swansons. What d’you think?”
“Honestly,” Aurora said, “I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that you just suggested a shotgun wedding with a midget Elvis as the minister.”
“Shit, I just used that as an example, Aurora,” chuckled Ryker. “It doesn’t have to be Elvis marrying us. What I was getting at was that I just want the ceremony to be fast, so that you don’t get a chance to take off again!”
Aurora grinned.
They drove without talking for a little while. The monotony of the highway contrasted sharply with her memories of the past few chaotic days, making it seem as if her time with Finn had been a dream.
Was that the dream? she wondered. Because going back to Nebraska feels far more like going back to sleep.
“Hey, Ryker,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Can you pull over at the next truck-stop? I’ve got use the ladies’ room.”
“Sure.”
Ryker pulled into the truck-stop and they walked into the little diner. They noticed that the smattering of customers were all turned towards the small television screen in the corner. The news was on, showing a huge wild fire that had erupted in rural New York. The amateur video shot on mobile phones showed hungry orange flames, billowing smoke, and firemen staging hoses.
Ryker let out a low whistle. “Hot damn, that sucker doesn’t look like it’s too far behind us. I recognize that township; we went through there not half an hour ago. We should skedaddle before it catches up to us.” He turned from the screen to Aurora. “Hey Lemon-pie, you should hurry up and do your thing so that we can hit the road again, okay?”
Aurora’s eyes remained glued to the screen.
Is that a natural blaze, or something else?
She felt Ryker’s touch on her arm, turned to him with eyes that were focused on another man’s face.
“Aurora, go to the washroom, hon,” he said.
“I’ve got to go,” she said to him.
Ryker rolled his eyes. “Jeez, what’s wrong with you? You’ve been a space-cadet for the past hour. I know you’ve got to go, that’s why we pulled over.”
He leaned in to kiss her on the mouth, but Aurora turned her face back to the television so that he kissed her cheek instead.
“Okay, hurry up and use the bathroom and I’ll get us some coffee.”
Expressionlessly, Aurora watched Ryker line up over at the counter. She looked out the large truck stop windows, her eyes walking across the asphalt, up the steps of the pedestrian bridge that spanned the highway. On the other side of the bridge was an almost identical truck-stop, although the road that ran past it was heading towards New York. A big green truck parked next to the stop, the faint black smoke coming from its exhaust showing that it was idling.
In a fraction of a se
cond Aurora made her decision. Suddenly, it was as clear as crystal. Settling for safe was setting up a lifetime of regret.
She strode out of the diner without a backwards glance at Ryker. There was no point.
You’ve made your decision. It’s going to hurt him – again, you bitch – but it’s better for everyone in the long run.
Aurora picked up the pace as she moved across the parking lot. She darted up the stairs, taking the last six two at a time, and raced across the pedestrian bridge, clutching her phone and purse to her chest. Down the other side of the bridge she went and then ran out onto the expansive concrete pad with her arms held up. The huge green truck was on the move, but came to a juddering halt just in front of her. The air-brakes hissed angrily as the huge vehicle stopped in its tracks.
“What in the hell are you doing, woman?” the driver bellowed out of his window, leaning almost half out so that he could really give her a piece of his mind. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“I’m sorry, sir!” Aurora called back.
“You ain’t as sorry as you could’ve been! What the hell are you doing?”
“Are you heading to New York?” Aurora asked, cutting to the chase.
“Headin’ that way, yeah,” conceded the truck driver, still looking down his impressively hairy nose at her. “Why?”
“Any chance I can get a ride with you?”
The man propped the visor of his baseball hat up with a gnarled finger and rubbed his eye. “And why would you be needing a ride so suddenly?” he said.
“It’s an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency? You ain’t done nothing illegal have you? You ain’t in trouble?”
“Nothing like that. It’s a romantic emergency, I guess you’d call it. And here comes trouble!” Aurora pointed at the pedestrian bridge and the figure of Ryker pelting across it, the two coffees still clutched in his hands. As Aurora and the truck driver watched, the cup lids flew off and Ryker was drenched in brown liquid. That only slowed him a little.
The truck driver looked down at Aurora. “As luck would have it, you might have just found the most romantically-inclined trucker east of Iowa. Hop in, miss; I’ll take you where you need to go.”
***
Aurora had been too much of a coward to look out the window as the truck pulled onto the east-bound highway. She didn’t want to see the confusion and heartbreak on Ryker’s face as she left him high and dry yet again.
“Well, girl,” said the truck driver, who’d introduced himself as Leroy, “I can’t say I wholeheartedly agree with the way you went about it, but I do understand why you did what you did.”
Aurora had spent the last half an hour telling Leroy why she found herself running away from the man she had previously considered to be her soul mate. In the interest of not being kicked out of the truck as a delusional lunatic, she refrained from mentioning that the New Yorker she planned to reunite with was not only a billionaire, but also part dragon.
“Yes, sir,” Leroy said again, “I can see why you did it. Though, in hindsight, maybe it would’ve been nicer on the feller just to have told him back in the city. Poor bastard still has another twenty hours to go before he makes it to Nebraska. That ain’t going to be a pleasant drive for him.”
“No,” Aurora said, feeling wretched. “No, it isn’t. He didn’t deserve that. But, I couldn’t keep stringing him along.”
“I understand,” Leroy said, bobbing his head. “I feel you.”
“I mean, there’s a whole big world out here, you know, and I’ve only seen the most minuscule part of it. I don’t want to go back to Nebraska and just exist, doing exactly what everyone expects me to.”
“Girl, I’ve been married three times,” Leroy told her. “Two of them times I ended up running for the hills, just like you did – though one time there was a lot of harsh words and a shotgun cartridge or two that ended up going through one of my truck’s doors. You know why I made a break for it?”
Aurora shook her head.
“My gut,” Leroy said.
On instinct, Aurora looked down at the trucker’s midriff.
Leroy snorted. “Nah, not my actual belly, woman! I mean, my gut feelin’. If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust, huh? Sometimes, as tough as it may be, you just got to cut and run. Otherwise, the things that start off as little annoyances become great, big resentments. You understand me, girl?”
“Yeah,” Aurora said, “I do.”
“Right.”
During this philosophizing, the sky had darkened as if a storm was coming in. Aurora craned her head and stared out the windshield. There weren’t any actual rainclouds, not as far as she could see. Leroy flicked on the truck lights. Then something landed briefly on the windshield. It was gone a moment later, whisked away by the wind.
“Was that a…” Aurora said, almost to herself.
“What did you say?” Leroy asked.
“Nothing. I just thought I saw –”
Another white flake swept up and over the windshield.
“Snow?” Aurora said, totally nonplussed.
“Snow?” Leroy chuckled. “It’s sixty degrees outside!”
More white flakes were landing on the windscreen and then being sucked up and over the cab.
There was a sudden crackling burst from the truck’s CB radio. Following an uneasy hunch, Aurora asked Leroy to turn up the volume.
“– is now heading west along either side of the I-80,” crackled the voice from the radio.
“What did he say was heading west?” Leroy asked. He had turned on his wipers now, the white flakes coming in greater profusion.
Aurora shook her head uneasily. “I didn’t hear,” she said.
Another truck roared past them in the opposite direction, its lights flashing and horn blaring.
The CB radio hissed into life again. “I’d advise anyone who’s trucking eastbound to turn their asses around. Now.”
Leroy’s weather-beaten face had creased up like an old piece of leather. “If this is kids,” he said, “then they need to get their dumb asses off the damn radio. This ain’t funny.”
Aurora’s face had gone pale. She remembered the TV in the truck-stop. “This isn’t kids,” she whispered.
“It has jumped the highway; I repeat it has jumped the highway!” the radio squawked. “It’s over the highway, just east of Hope Creek by the Delaware River!”
“What in blazes is this about?” Leroy said, turning the big rig smoothly around a sweeping corner.
They rounded the long bend going fifty-five miles per hour. Then Leroy stamped on the breaks.
Aurora screamed involuntarily as the rig juddered and moaned, leaving smoking rubber tracks down the highway. It came to a rocking halt in the middle of the asphalt, lights blazing through the gloom.
“Well would you look at that shit!” Leroy said faintly.
The woods ahead of them – to either side of the highway – were now a roaring inferno. Black and orange and red and gold, the fire roared through the pines. Flames licked up towards the sky, thirty feet or more above the tops of the trees. It was, in a word; apocalyptic.
Aurora sat rigid, as if she had been carved from stone, staring at the scorched, fiery vista in front of her. Ash floated down like…well, like the snow that she had thought it was.
Leroy was the first to break the spell that held them.
“Alright, girly,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt, “that’s our cue. Time for us to make like horse shit and hit the trail.”
Aurora grabbed hold of his arm. “Wait! Surely – surely it makes more sense to stay in here?”
Leroy looked at her with an amused gleam in his eye. “Are you out of your mind?” he asked.
Aurora raised her eyebrows.
“When you waved my truck down, did you not even see what I was pullin’
Aurora shook her head.
“I’ve got about eleven-thousand gallons of gasoline strapped behind us,” Le
roy said. “If we wait for the fire to reach us, the next waiting you’re going to be doing is at the pearly gates. Now, let’s go! There ain’t too much wind, so our chances of outrunning still look pretty good.”
“Why can’t you just turn around?” Aurora asked.
Leroy waved a hand. “Ain’t time, girl, ain’t no time!”
The flames roared louder, so loudly that Aurora could feel the noise reverberating in her chest, like the call of some infinitely hungry beast. She sat, frozen with shock and indecision, looking from the approaching fires to Leroy and back to the fires.
“Girly, you’re sitting at the front of a bomb! Do you hear what I’m telling you?” Leroy said, gripping her arm and shaking her. There was sweat beading on his forehead. Aurora could feel the heat building herself.
“Ah, to hell with it then!” the trucker yelled. He wrenched his door handle and kicked the driver side door open. Then he jumped down to the road. Before he took off he looked once more at the stricken figure of the young woman in his truck.
“There’s a goddamn fire extinguisher under the dash,” he said.
Then he was gone, leaving only the swirling ash and smoke in his place.
Dumbly, Aurora gazed out at the slowly approaching fire. Trees cracked and splintered in the firestorm, sap boiling and exploding with a sound like gunshots. A couple of raccoons raced up the road, fleeing the raging blaze.
It felt like all the world was whirling ash and embers. Gusts of scalding wind buffeted the truck, shaking it as if it weighed no more than a cardboard box. The seconds trickled by, while Aurora waited for the inevitable end.
There was a huge gust of air that rocked the big rig from side to side, the suspension squeaking in protest. Aurora squealed, pulling her knees instinctively up to her chest and covering her head with her arms in a pathetic attempt to ward off fourteen-hundred degrees of blistering, deadly heat that was moving inexorably towards her.
Suddenly, the cab of the truck seemed to explode. Huge, horny talons punched through the windows of the truck, showering Aurora with broken glass. Then the truly deafening scream of metal being forcibly torn apart and, abruptly, Aurora was sitting in the open air – still in the passenger seat of the truck, but the cabin was now roofless. The heat washed over her, and she choked on the thick ash swirling in the air.
Arousing a Dragon Page 13